Laurie taylor was a 1960s father. He viewed his role as little more than standing back-often at a considerable distance-and waiting for the unique personality of his only son, Matthew, to emerge through play and experience. Matthew Taylor, in contrast, was determined to provide stability for his two sons. While Matthew's childhood had involved shifting combinations of parents and step-parents and several different primary schools, he insisted that his own children would live in one place, go to one school and know one family. So when Matthew asked Laurie to explain why he had bothered having a child in the first place, it was no surprise that the answer was far from convincing. What neither had expected was how hard Matthew would find it to answer the same question.
This father-son dialogue prompted us to begin asking other people-mainly friends and colleagues-why they had become parents. The first response was often indignant. How could one even ask such a question? There were some things in life that could not be reduced to utilitarian calculation. Parenthood was intrinsically good. The value of having children of one's own was surely something that was timeless, a value that transcended shifts in political and religious beliefs. Whatever our views, we are all capable, as Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West put it in their defence of parenthood, The War Against Parents, of being "caught up in the miracle of birth," of being "inspired... by the power of a small child to evoke our most sublime and selfless feelings."
But the miracle of birth and the power of the small child to evoke such transcendent feelings needs to be supplemented by other, more tangible reasons for having children. This was where the problems arose. The (middle-class) parents we spoke to could not cite economic security in old age as a reason for having children but they seemed equally unhappy to fall back on instinct or cultural norms. This left only one alternative. They must have had their children because they wanted to. They had exercised a rational choice. They were merely on the opposite side of the calculus from all those millions of other people who had taken advantage of the widespread availability of contraception and abortion to make the equally self-conscious decision not to breed.
The statistics are dramatic. Has there ever been a process of social change as rapid and profound as the decline in the fertility rate over the last 40 years? For some countries it has become a big public issue. In Sweden, where the fertility rate over the last ten years has declined from 2.1 children per woman (the level needed to maintain the population in a stable state) to a meagre 1.5, former tennis star Bjorn Borg has appeared on government-sponsored posters with the unambiguous injunction "Fuck for the Future."
European Union statistics published earlier this month revealed that the birth rate in Germany has fallen to 1.34, in Italy to 1.19 and in Spain to 1.15. In Britain the rate 30 years ago was 2.4-the figure we still use to describe the ordinary family. Since then the rate has fallen by a third to its current level of 1.66. The combination of wealth, superior healthcare and contraception allows us to have the smaller families our ancestors might have chosen if they could have. But perhaps the most striking fact is the rise in the number of women who do not have children at all. In the 1940s only one in ten women did not have children; now that figure is almost one in four. Women are also having children later: the average age for having a first child is nearly 30. It is thus harder to talk about a maternal instinct when there is so much evidence that it is being overridden. (Yet this instinct remains a reality for many women, and in the case of those who find it difficult or impossible to have children it is a cause of profound unhappiness.)
The growing importance of women's careers may mean that having children today is regarded as a practical option only by those with such low expectations that they assume they have no career to ruin, or those so well off they can afford a surrogate family to run things while mother and father are away at work. (The last ten years has also seen a rise in families with three or more children and the re-emergence of an almost Edwardian style family, replete with nanny, gardener, cleaner and so on.) For the rest of us it appears at least as appropriate to ask why anyone would choose to have children as to enquire why they have chosen not to.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett's work suggests that older professional women who have not had children invariably regret it later. But those in their twenties and thirties who have chosen childlessness are, for now, rather confident about it. A recent survey, cited by Eleanor Mills in the Spectator, found that 24 per cent of women didn't want to have children because they didn't want to give up their careers. Mills quotes 30-year-old Beth, a television producer: "I've put in hard work and I'm finally at the stage where my job is fun. Why should I give up everything I've worked for? I couldn't do this job with a child and I wouldn't want to." Isn't that selfish? asked Mills. "No," chipped in Beth's friend, "it's much more selfish to bring more children into an overpopulated world."
Even those who have chosen to procreate can feel twinges of regret. Here is John from Leeds: "The other day we had dinner with a childless couple we know. As they told us-between our visits to see to our insomniac five and six year olds-about their plans for a two-week trekking holiday in Nepal, I found myself feeling envious and even angry... by the time I have the freedom to go to Nepal I'll be too old and worn out to do it. I am happily married with two perfectly normal kids, yet I feel this way."
Perhaps we need to face the awkward truth that having children in today's world is counterintuitive. As Daniel Bell and other social critics have been telling us for years, modern consumer capitalism promotes instrumentalism, materialism, individualism, and the prizing of choice and autonomy over all other human capacities. But these values run counter to the unselfish, affective, long-term commitment that we associate with good child-rearing. And having children is a double whammy, because it usually also involves making a long-term commitment to another adult-with yet more loss of choice and autonomy.
This predicament was foreseen over 50 years ago by Joseph Schumpeter in his analysis of the self-destructive characteristics of capitalism, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. It was, he argued, only a matter of time before (bourgeois) men and women began to feed child-bearing into the system of cost-accounting that informed other parts of their lives. When this was done, prospective parents "cannot fail to become aware of the heavy personal sacrifices that family ties and especially parenthood entail under modern conditions..."
Missing from Schumpeter's analysis is an account of those other features of the modern world that have invalidated the traditional reasons for having children and thereby opened the door to the type of calculus he chronicles. Parents nowadays, as our interviews confirmed, find it increasingly difficult to say that they want to have children because such children will, in one way or another, be their descendants.
In a meritocracy it becomes increasingly difficult to regard our offspring as inheritors of our power and position in society, as beings who will carry on the name of the family. Neither can we expect them to prove their worth by continuing in the family profession. Until recently it was perfectly possible to find families whose commitment to the church, the army or the farm went back for generations. These occupations, together with the craft skills that were transmitted across working-class generations, have long been in decline. The jobs in the "new economy" that replace them may attract status and high salaries but is it possible for a management consultant or an advertising executive to think of their position as one that might be transmitted or bequeathed to their offspring?
It is not only the capacity to pass on one's name, position and occupation that has been subverted in the modern world. One of the incentives to have children in the past was the knowledge that they would be inheritors of one's moral code. Parents could still confidently believe that their life had equipped them with a set of precepts for living that were a more important legacy than the family silver. Advice to one's children, whether delivered by Polonius or by Lord Chesterfield, was not regarded as a set of take it or leave it tips for getting by in the world, but as the manner by which one generation could help secure a better future for the next. The problems for today's parents is that their current domestic and occupational lives do not provide this type of master script.
Nor is there much comfort to be found in the idea of "betterment." A generation ago we could take pleasure and extract purpose from our children's role as agents of social mobility. Unlike their parents they could continue their education to the sixth form, go to university and secure a respectable job. But when we asked parents what they wanted for their children in later life, they were likely to be far less specific, far less committed to the idea of their offspring's material advancement. All they wanted for their children was contentment, possibly happiness.
Nobody has better captured the relationship between these disappearing forms of inheritance and the reluctance to bring children into the world than the French writer Michel Houellebecq in his novel Atomised: "Children once existed solely to inherit a man's genes, his moral code and his name. This was taken for granted among the aristocracy, but merchants, craftsmen and peasants also bought into the idea, it became the norm at every level of society. That's all gone now... there's nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him. I haven't a clue what he might do when he's older. By the time he grows up, the rules I lived by will be meaningless-the world will be completely different. If a man accepts this... then his life is reduced to nothing more than the sum of his own experience-past and future generations mean nothing to him. That's how we live now. For a man to bring a child into the world now is meaningless."
Neither did our interviewees seem to place much reliance upon the notion that having children constituted a special form of commitment between parents, a sort of guarantee that here is a relationship which will last. This might have been a credible account 20 years ago, but now the statistics on family breakdown are too well known for any couple to feel such confidence about their own capacity for remaining together. The rate of divorce has more than doubled in the last 30 years and nearly three out of ten children experience their parents divorcing before they have reached 16. With the rate of cohabitation increasing fourfold over the same period and the evidence that cohabiting couples are much more likely to split than married couples, we are approaching the point where only a minority of children are born into a partnership that persists into adulthood.
We can, of course, continue to talk of children as our heirs in a more minimalist sense. They may not perpetuate our name or our profession or our moral code, but they are at least a product of the environment that we create for them. They slowly understand the world through our eyes, through the stories that we tell them, the expeditions that we arrange, the examples that we set. But the relative reluctance of our interviewees to talk about such initiatory pleasures suggests a growing sense that our children are not ours in the manner in which we were our own parent's children. The prospect of slowly introducing our offspring to the excitements and mysteries of life has been usurped by outside forces. Television and the internet offer young children a technicolour interactive introduction to nature and science that can hardly be matched by the best efforts of the most assiduous parent. These technologies also ensure that even seven year olds have the type of knowledge about drug-taking, criminality and sexual behaviour that might previously have been thought precocious in a teenager.
Consumer culture undermines the family in other ways too. Forty years ago, when the motor of profitability lay in the manufacture of consumer durables like washing machines, vacuum cleaners and television, the happy suburban family was the leitmotif of postwar advertising. Indeed, as Susan Faludi has written, the feminism of the 1960s represented a rejection not so much of men per se as of the image of woman as represented in the make-up wearing, goods buying, processed-food cooking housewife. This cloying image needed revision, but at least it was a form of consumerism compatible with motherhood. Now there is much less money to be made in white goods and much more in fashion, leisure and sex. The pert and perfect housewife has been replaced on the advertising hoardings by the brash, sexually assertive "new lass." Liberating, exciting, clever it may be-child friendly it is not.
So what can be done? We must start by recognising that the unwillingness to have children does not merely create a demographic problem. It is a symptom of a culture that has become too preoccupied by the central tenet of liberal modernity: individual self-fulfilment. Or rather it is a symptom of a culture that defines that self-fulfilment too narrowly. Post-God, post-socialism, we still need something to connect us to each other and to the future course of human history. Children are the new eschatology. And far from being an alternative to the public world they are increasingly what links us to that public world and to politics-children, after all are one reason we care so much about schools, crime and our local environment.
Having acknowledged that a child-friendly society is one building block of the good society, we need to consider how we can achieve it. Perhaps the answer lies in taking Schumpeter's cost-accounting analogy seriously: we must consider how the disappearance of so many traditional reasons for having children, and the arrival on the scene of so many cultural and social impediments to the enjoyment of child rearing, has upset the scales. This imbalance can't be corrected by a return to traditional values. Children are not going to become economic necessities again. Neither is there any way in which people might be persuaded to procreate by moral injunction. We have instead to consider ways to build a society where the desire to have children once again seems "natural."
It is difficult to propose political interventions in family policy. Even to admit there is a problem can provide succour for authoritarians who believe contraception, divorce and sexual freedom are tearing apart the social fabric. There is also the danger of any debate about the dilemmas faced by middle-class families being seen as a distraction from what should surely be the priority for a society concerned with child welfare-tackling poverty.
But these objections should not stop us asking how having and staying with children might involve more joy and less sacrifice at all levels of society. Whilst changing patterns of family life reflect deep cultural and social changes on the one hand, and millions of personal decisions on the other, there is much that can be done at the level of public policy to make ours a more family-friendly society.
The first objective-so simple it is hard to see why it remains so distant-is to find a way of better balancing family and work. As in so many other areas Labour has made a start but needs to go much further in its second term if it is to be judged a successful radical administration. The government is apparently resisting calls for mothers (let alone parents) to have the right to have their jobs back on a part-time basis after returning from childbirth. On the other hand, to its credit Labour has significantly expanded both access to child care and financial support to pay for it-particularly for low-paid mothers. In addition to increases in child benefit, the government is providing extra help to low income families through the child care tax credit, which pays up to 60 per cent of child care costs for the low paid. But with the national shortage of child minders, along with growing evidence (albeit controversial) of adverse effects on children of too much early separation from their parents, the aim of policy should be to help parents to choose a more balanced life. Whilst women must not be denied choice about how to balance work and life, it would be real progress if every mother had the realistic option of living without full-time work for the early years of her child's life. (This will not automatically send the birth rate soaring, as the example of Sweden shows-a far more family-friendly country than Britain with an even lower birthrate.)
More broadly, put-ting the needs of families and children at the heart of public policy requires us to question the ideology of the neo-liberal right and some of the traditional objectives of the left. It means a politics that takes seriously the evidence that the top two thirds of society are now on an affluence plateau on which there is no longer any correlation between rising wealth and well-being. This agenda is not necessarily antagonistic to the traditional objectives of economic growth and rising incomes. But it recognises that the purpose of growth is to give us better quality lives. More and more families feel they can only keep up by having both parents working full time. Economic progress should be measured not just through GDP, productivity or employment but also through our capacity to live comfortably while working fewer hours. One of the arguments for good public services is that they enable people to choose to earn less than they might, safe in the knowledge that the most important things in life are free. Otherwise we will get used to the poignant irony of mothers (at least those in the top part of the income spectrum) leaving their young children with the au pair so they can go out and earn enough to pay for private school fees.
A society in which it is good both to be and bring up a child would have to contest many current assumptions. Consider transport. Britain's child pedestrian fatality rate is double that of Germany. The need for speed has been put above the freedom of children to play in safety. Where there is a conflict with cars, pedestrians have been corralled off the street into dark and dangerous underground passages. Big businesses and big governments want big projects: road, rail and runway. This neglects the human aspects of transport: whether a neighbourhood is pleasant to walk in; whether the bus is accessible to parents with pushchairs, people with shopping or to the elderly and disabled. Tony Blair recently made a speech in which he referred to the importance of "liveability," public spaces that are good to live and work in, but it remains unclear how this concept can be turned into second term policy.
There are many other examples. Presumably as a way of justifying additional expenditure, the government has encouraged a largely functional account of education: "the more you learn the more you earn." But as well as rising basic standards in education there is also evidence of more mental illness and behavioural problems among children. Rather than an education that merely prepares children for our imperfect society we need one that helps children develop their own sense of worth. Our conversations with parents suggest that their greatest aspiration for their children is that they be well-balanced and content, that they grow up feeling confident about having their children of their own. Such hopes are unlikely to be realised without a rethink of both the school curriculum and the relationship between school, parents and community. Labour has said it wants every school to be a specialist school: how about allowing some schools to choose emotional intelligence as their speciality?
This new politics of "liveability" would also force us to address the impact on our characters and relationships of consumer capitalism. One cautionary tale points to how difficult this is within the constraints of mainstream politics. Two years ago the then public health minister Tessa Jowell called together the fashion and women's media industries to consider the effects of "super waif" images on young girls in the face of rising levels of eating disorder and mental illness. Ever since the event Jowell has met parents and girls who tell her about their own experiences and how grateful they are to her for raising the issue. But at the time of the summit, New Labour's spin-doctors-fearful of the reaction of focus groups-washed their hands of Jowell's initiative. The idea that the activities of consumer capitalism might be undercutting the relationship between parents and children was too dangerous to discuss.
What originally prompted this article was the discovery, when we talked to a small sample of parents among our friends and acquaintances, that there was a great deal of uncertainty about why we have children. The long list of traditional reasons concerned with economic necessity, continuity and inheritance, no longer apply. In some ways this uncertainty amounts to little more than the familiar list of problems and anxieties created by modern life. It is hardly news that we live in a world where moral codes are ambiguous, where work has lost its connection with identity, where consumer capitalism invades even those areas of life which we once regarded as most intensely personal. But the recognition that such conditions undermine any attempt by parents to provide a convincing account of their decision to have children has a special potency. It links us to our current fatalism. It reminds us that there was a time when one of the most persuasive reasons for having children was the sense that they could make a difference.
As adults we may have learned to live with the permanent present-that day-to-day flux of complexities and contingencies that inhibits our capacity to formulate visions of a future and better society. That's life, we say to ourselves. But do we really want this hesitancy in the face of the future, this disconnection, to be the only legacy that we leave our children? As Andrew Gamble has recently reminded us, a belief in history and in the future is essential to the progressive project.
The inability of our interviewees to provide answers to our initial question-what use are children?-is related to the variety of ways in which parental energies have been devalued. The result of this devaluation is, as Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West put it, a failure to realise that the sacrificial, other-directed work that parents do is the "wellspring of compassion, competence and commitment in society." It is also, we would add, the only sort of work that currently allows us to lift our eyes from the present and impels us to consider what we would like life to be for a generation other than our own. Children, it turns out, are the necessary countervailing force to liberal modernity.
